The Futuristic Concept
of Smart City.

The buzz word of today is “SMART”, Smart Phone, Smart City, Smart Development, Smart Education and Smart People. Everything around shall be Smart. Smart involves growing technological support in our day today life to make it ease and comfortable. We are driving towards a knowledgeable world, where technology keeps you updated and facilitates the interactions in civic world through smarter technologies. But we have to keep caution because “SMART shall not become OVER SMART” and finally dumb.

We are talking about Smart City now days with a goal of making 100 Smart cities. Our definition of city is still guided by Census. Before becoming smart we must understand we are talking about Indian cities where in every city half of its population lives in unplanned settlements and more on 60% of Urban Population thriving on Informal Sector. While making cities SMART are we going to drive them out or make them settle in fringes?

Our concept of SMART City shall be inclusive as well as sustainable. It has to be in Phases and also selective. So, the Development has to be in a phased and in an “inclusive manner” for maintaining sustainability.

The Smart City Concept involves the following:

Smart Economy

Smart Environment

Smart Governance

Smart People

Smart Mobility

Smart Living

Vayam’s Offering For Smart Cities:

Vayam Technologies Limited as already been a part of the Smart thought and has worked towards making cities Smarter:

Smart Governance:

Vayam has undertaken IT consultancy for e-Governance for city of Lucknow, Gwalior, Indore and Itanagar, whereby complete IT road map of the municipal bodies have been drawn. Vayam has implemented GIS integrated e-municipality application for NandedWaghela City Municipal Corporation, providing portal based services, of G2C and G2G for municipal functions, it addresses citizen’s grievances, provides Mobile Governance services and GIS based reports about Tax payers and Non payers for Property Tax and Water Tax with details of the arrears; Citizen’s Grievances reported from which location and for which department; Solid waste generation types and Google Earth Integration for Project Management Applications. www.nwcmc.gov.in.

Smart Living:

For Safety and Security system solution Vayam has tie up with Sundance Systems US for Automated Call Dispatch system, this has been demonstrated to UP Police. A pilot Study has been conducted with Korean Company Securo for City Surveillance inn NOIDA. Vayam is already providing Camera based surveillance for Chennai and Kolkata airports. The Smart Cameras and Control Room solutions for video analytics provide the base for surveillance system. Smart Mobility: Vayam GMV Consortium has provided Intelligent Transport Management System for the country’s first successful BRTS Ahmedabad Janmarg Limited which has a daily commuter Strength of more than 1 lakh 30 thousand. The RFID and Smartcard based Ticketing has been the backbone of financial strength of the AJL. The control system has 12 hours monitoring of the entire BRTS corridor’s bus movement enabled by Automated Vehicle Tracking system,a two way communication between the buses and the Control center to handle any emergency along with the contact center services to address the grievances of the passengers. The fleet and crew are being managed using a depot management system. The same system is under the implementation for Surat Municipal Corporation. Both the BRTS has effective Public Information System for updating the bus arrival to commuters through PIS over station and also using SMS based query. SMS based Travel enquiry has been first implemented in the country by Vayam in Chandigarh Transport Undertaking. ETM based ticketing is already in use by seven cities under UPSRTC.

Smart People:

Vayam has created the Mobile Based applications for event management for its international client. To make people access the municipal services and B2B services using ICT Vayam has been successfully providing the services via its Citizen Service Center Portal and Kiosks in operation in 6000+ locations in 30 Districts of the state of Uttar Pradesh, where by it has been awarded for highest Government Transactions through its Kiosks.

Smart Economy:

As an initiative towards Smart economy, Vayam has also developed a revenue based model of e-governance for NDMC to strengthen its revenue stream out of e-municipal services and also bring transparency. The property Tax, Water tax, Electricity billing, hording, Advertisement, Parking allotment, estate Management has been automated. It not only multiplied the revenue generation of the NDMC manifolds, it also improves the citizen’s accessibility for payments of the services.

Smart Environment:

Vayam has experience of conducting Investment Grade Energy Audit identifying all possible energy conservation measures including detailed project engineering. Vayam had been a consultant to BEE and also defined their IT road Map.

Approach

To start with we need a set of spatial database, by which we map every property, every utility and complete landuse and landcover in the cities, to know what is where and in what state. The information can then be layered and integrated with relative technologies for the development.

While Infrastructure Development will be the priority in the segments lacking them water supply, housing, roads, sanitation, waste management and electricity.

There is necessity of organizing the informal segments by registration of their business, training the people, allocating space, monitoring the development. In making the infrastructure of the city smart the Traffic and Transportation of the city need to be automated in terms of Traffic Management through Intelligent Traffic system and integrating all the modes of transport in a city through Intelligent Transport management system, this also involves improving public information system for transport. Mobile based information on transport facility and traffic makes accessibility smoother for the people. The Municipal services and other public utility services shall be automated and integrated with e-governance so that there is increasing participation of people in municipal governance while the pressure is reduced on citizen’s end for travelling and following municipal officials as well as Officials end related to crowd management.

Every city shall have grievance Management cells for giving proper hearing to people. Security of the citizens is one of the most important roles of the Government machinery of the city, where technology can help in a better way. Already city surveillance, automation of Dial 100 is in progress in many part of the country but it shall be connected with Traffic and emergency management system for better response.

Technology can best play its part in empowering people who have fewer resources, making them organized and accessing the Government machinery for the all formalities. Information Kiosk with last mile connectivity as a part of neighborhood planning can suffice these purpose. Technology also has to play a part in synchronizing e-wallet system for accessing public utilities and facilities by people.

Conclusion

The country has initiated the Smarter Development since last two decades using IT and communication technology in all spheres if life, but with the government’s vision of “Smart City” these efforts will be concretized and get a final objective, i.e Smart City but we need to consider the typical problems of Indian cities and also shall think of harmonious development for everybody while making our efforts of making our cities Smarter.